Summary

Sophie, a young girl, finds anonymous letters in her mail posing philosophical questions. She starts a correspondence with the mysterious pen-pal and uses what she learns to unravel the mystery of another girl, Hilde, whose mail also keeps arriving in Sophie's mail box.

Movie Reviews

Sophie's World June 24, 2005

Silje Storstein as Sophie in Sophie's World.

There are many ways to approach the learning of philosophy.
First, one of the hard ways.

Open Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness and the
following conceptual jumble assaults your brain: "Consciousness is
a being whose existence posits its essence, and inversely it is
consciousness of a being, whose essence implies its existence . . .
We must understand that this being is no other than the
transphenomenal being of phenomena and not a noumenal being which
is hidden behind them."

Makes your brain hurt, doesn't it. Now, for those of you who
didn't beeline to the liquor cabinet to bleach Sartre's linguistic
peat bog from your transphenomenal being, here's an easier
way to sample the delights of philosophical inquiry: grab a mug of
hot cocoa, curl up on the lounge, and turn to Sophie's
World.

Journeys though the world of philosophy don't come much sweeter
than this four-part drama based on Jostein Gaarder's book of the
same name. Sophie is a 14-year-old who has a batty mother and an
inquisitive mind. Anonymous letters start to arrive for her,
sparking a tour through the history of philosophy. "Who are you?"
asks the first. "Where did the world come from?" asks the next.
Before we know it we're in ancient Greece watching Socrates
sentenced to death for encouraging people to think for themselves,
and hearing Plato explain that the world revealed by our senses is
not the real world but only a poor copy of it.

To get there we are transported by a kind of Norwegian magic
realism, in which the mysterious letters turn up in impossible
places, a school essay writes itself, and a dog acts as a
go-between to lead Sophie to her philosophy guide. In later
episodes we accompany Sophie to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance,
Romanticism and the Russian Revolution.

The questions Sophie asks of the world are common to the
teenager and the Western philosophical tradition: issues of
identity, the purpose of existence, and the rules of living. They
are the questions we asked when we were young but put aside to get
on with life when it became clear that you can't continue to live
with such important questions unanswered and that the answering
would take a lifetime.

Sophie's World reminds us about those questions and
prompts us to think about them again. It also shows us that there
are more enjoyable ways to engage with philosophy than Sartre.